Ride-Sharing Vehicles Are Filled With Germs

While most of us can barely get from one place to another without Uber or Lyft, here’s a new reason you may want to think twice before you hail a car from one of these ride-sharing services.

According to a new study by Insurance company NetQuote, the actual inside of a ride-sharing vehicle is pretty gross. In fact, it contains 219 times as many germs as the average taxi. If that doesn’t sound gross enough for you, it also has more than three times the amount of germs as a toothbrush holder and more than 35,000 times the germs of the average toilet seat.

Overall, the average ride share vehicle contains six million germs, while rental cars have two million, and taxies only have about 27,593, mostly because they are washed regularly. As for the germiest parts of a ride share vehicle, the window button is the biggest culprit, with 5 million germs, followed by the seat belt with one million and the door handles, with 1,810.

There is one thing to note however. The study only looked at three of each type of vehicle so you can take the results with a grain of salt. The truth is the numbers could be better for ride-share vehicles, but they also could be a lot worse.